christians

Historically, there is animosity
between Christians and the followers of Ællinismόs

In the first century of the Common
Era, a new religion appeared which challenged all the previous ancient
religions in the western world. Eventually this religion gained political power
and usurped all the other religions and philosophies and dominated the western
world for hundreds of years. This religion is Christianity and the subject of
this essay is the confrontation which this new religion presented to Ællinismόs, the ancient Greek religion, and all the ancestral religious
traditions, and on how this confrontation bears relevance to the 21st century
in the west and beyond.

The Essential Background

Christianity begins with the life of
Jesus, a Jew who was born shortly before the beginning of the Common Era, about
3 BCE. The Jewish religious world in which he dwelt was monotheist, that is,
the Jews only worship one God. Many scholars now believe that Judaism was
originally a polytheistic tradition which developed into a monolatry, that is,
that the very ancient Jews acknowledged the existence of multiple Gods, but
only worshipped one. By the sixth century BCE, Judaism had become a complete
monotheism and denied the existence of any other Gods. This is the
religious world in which Jesus lived and taught. He lived in a humble
environment in Israel in the Galilean city of Nazareth. In ways which are
unclear, he became a teacher, and acquired a number of followers. This
career came apparently quite late in his rather short life, at perhaps
thirty years of age. His teaching was apocalyptic, a term which means that he
predicted a coming kingdom which would establish justice on Earth, and he
admonished his disciples to repent of their sins and to live their lives as
though this kingdom was to come soon. There were other Jewish teachers during
the time of Jesus who held similar views. Jesus is also said to have performed
miracles and to have healed the sick. In his sermons, he spoke of the
compassion of his God but also cautioned that this God possessed and was
willing to exercise great powers of retribution.

In the final week of his life,
during the Passover celebrations, the major festival of the Jews, Jesus and his
disciples entered Jerusalem. Jews were entering the city from various places and
needed to make sacrifice for the great religious festival. This required the
purchase of animals for sacrificial victims. Since these visitors where
arriving from many foreign lands, Roman, Greek, or other coinage needed to be
converted to the Jewish money because foreign currency usually had images
impressed on the coinage and images, especially religious images, were
forbidden in Judaism. Jesus, in a great fury, expelled the money-changers from
the temple, saying that this was a house of prayer but that they had made it
into a den of thieves. This act and other incidents caused great
consternation and worry in the Jewish elders who were likely fearful of any
kind of uprising during a nationalistic religious celebration when the country
was under the domination of the Roman Empire. Jesus was arrested, put on trial
before Pontius Pilate the Roman prefect of Judaea, and crucified like a common
criminal. He died at perhaps the age of thirty-three, around 30 CE.

After the crucifixion, Jesus was
buried or entombed, but his disciples claimed that he rose from the dead and
ascended into heaven. The resurrection of Jesus eventually became the focal
point of the new religion. The disciples preached that if one would believe in
Jesus and in the power of his death to purify one’s sins, a Christian could
share in his resurrection and be saved from a life of eternity in a post-death
place of eternal suffering. If someone wished to convert to this religion, he
was instructed and underwent a ritual called baptism in which the individual
was either submerged under or sprinkled in some way with water. Christians also
engaged in a communal meal commemorating the last supper of Jesus and his
disciples, in which they ate bread and drank wine, representation of his body
and blood.

The ancient Hebrew scriptures
prophesied that a messiah would come to rescue Israel in a mighty show of
justice and retribution; the Christians believed that this messiah was none
other than Jesus of Nazareth. Therefore, Jesus came to be called the Christ.
The word Christ comes from the Greek Khristós (Christos;
Gr. Χριστός), which means “the anointed one.” It is the Greek
translation of the Hebrew Mashiah (Messiah), which means
"king." The kings were anointed with oil, hence the choice of
this word in the Greek language, which became the first language of the
writings of the early Christians.

Christianity arose in Israel, the
place of its birth, a country unique in the ancient world because
the predominant religion was, as we have already stated, monotheistic, i.e. the
worship of one God. The rest of the world espoused
polytheistic religions, those which worshiped many Gods. The early
Christians were Jews and therefore they also believed in the worship of one
God, but in time they came to understand that Jesus was the one God of the
Jews. As the beginning centuries of the new religion went by, literature was
composed about the life of Jesus and these scriptures referred to three
separate entities, all of which seemed to be divine. By the Fourth Century CE,
the Christians had developed a rather obscure theology called the doctrine of
the Trinity: three persons in one God, the Father, the Son (Jesus), and the
Holy Spirit.

Persecutions of Christians by Jews

From the beginning, there had been
persecution of the followers of Jesus, but the first persecutions were not from
the Hellenes or from the Romans, but rather, arose from opposition to Christian
teaching in Israel in the synagogues and Jewish communities. The Jewish
role of the persecution of Christians does not particularly concern us here,
but it marks the onset of a phenomenon, a reaction to something about what
Christians were doing, that resulted in the repression of this religion.
Christianity began as a purely Jewish sect which was evangelical, and their
zeal commenced in the communities from which the religion arose, Jewish
communities, and there was trouble from the start. They taught that the
Messiah predicted in Jewish scriptures was none other than Jesus of Nazareth,
who had been crucified in Jerusalem. Most Jews thought that this
claim was preposterous for more than one reason, but chief amongst them was
that crucifixion was viewed as a humiliation and that someone who was
punished thus could not possibly be the predicted savior of the Jewish
people. Since the Christian Jews were persistent, they created tremendous
friction in their communities, eventually leading to persecution against the
new religion. This can be seen in the writings of Paul (Galatians 1.13),
a Jew who himself persecuted Christians before he converted. There is also
confirmation of this in the Acts of the Apostles (9.1) and
considerable evidence in Christian writings outside of the canonical scriptures
and even in non-Christian sources.

As Christianity began to extend
beyond the boundaries of Israel, their problems with Jews followed them. Jews
lived in many parts of the empire and, being monotheists, had the potential of
being targets of pagan persecution for similar theological reasons as
Christians, but they had several advantages. For one, they were not evangelical
and from the perspective of religion, they did not condemn, but kept to
themselves, an ancient people who were content to enjoy the benefits of a
rather private covenant which they shared with their one God, so they were not
offensive to the polytheistic communities in which they settled because of the
private nature of their religious covenant. The Jews had another great
advantage over Christians; the Romans saw Judaism as a very ancient
and venerable religion, and because of this, the Jews were exempt from
particular laws which affected Christians. For instance, when Roman citizens
were required to sacrifice to the emperor for the benefit of the state, the Jews
were allowed to simply sacrifice, but not required to worship the emperor, out
of respect for the traditions of this very ancient religion. This exemption was
highly desired by Christians, and they claimed that the antiquity of Judaism
was actually their own possession and, further, that the Jewish covenant was
actually fulfilled in Jesus. By the time of Justin Martyr (100-165 CE) the
Christians were claiming that the Jews never actually understood their own
scriptures and that these books were in truth their own inheritance
and not the Jews, that the Hebrew scriptures were actually Christian. This can
be seen in Justin Martyr's Dialogue With Trypho, starting with
chapter 71. More such ideas can be found in the Epistle of
Barnabas (exact authorship unknown). This aroused tremendous animosity
between Jews and Christians and the hostility became so great that Christians
began calling Jews Christ-killers.

For the above and various additional
reasons beyond the scope of this essay, Jews generally rejected Christianity
and the friction between the two communities festered into Christian
antisemitism. This antisemitism arose in early times and continued through its
entire history extending even into the present.

The background on the ancient
polytheistic world

In order to discuss the entry of
Christianity in to the ancient religious world, it is essential to have
some understanding of the religious views which confronted the new religion.
Christianity, being an offshoot of Judaism, was monotheistic. The world into
which it now entered was quite different. Once the religion left Israel, it
entered the vast regions of the Roman Empire, from Egypt and northern Africa in
the south, from the Greek-like areas from Albania through Dalmatia, from Italy
and Gaul to Hispania, this, and the world beyond the Roman Empire, almost
everywhere they would encounter polytheistic religions.

The Roman Empire consisted primarily
of religious variations of the ancient Greek religion. The eastern countries
had been conquered by Alexander the Great and were Hellenized by those who
followed him. In the west, people who were educated greatly admired Greek
civilization, so to the extent possible, they adopted the religions of Greece.
In any case, even the pre-Greek religions were markedly similar to the Greek
religions in that they were all polytheistic. These religions had pantheons of
many, many Gods who were seen to have governance over every aspect of
nature.

The ancient peoples were very
religious. There were temples everywhere, from humble structures to grand and
elegant marvels of architecture. The ancient peoples worshiped Gods, knowledge
of which they inherited from their family ancestry and communities, and as
travelers passed through their countries, they would sometimes adopt the worship
of other Gods. In cases where educated people traveled to other lands,
sometimes they would assume that the Gods of these lands were the same Gods
whom they worshiped already, but known in the foreign countries by other names,
as can be seen win the writings of the historian Herodotus when he
visited Egypt. So we can see from this that one of the most evident and
admirable characteristics of polytheism is openness and tolerance. In fact,
there was virtually no religious intolerance in the ancient world.

Polytheistic religions generally use
statues in their worship of Gods. It is not true that they thought that these
statues actually contained the spirit of the Gods, but perhaps amongst the
uneducated this was not as true. Some of the polytheistic religions from the
Eastern parts of the empire did not use statues in their worship, as they felt
that deity could not be adequately represented. In any case, the use of statues
was forbidden in the Jewish religion and Christians inherited this position, at
least in the earliest of times.

One significant difference between the
ancestral religions and Christianity concerned the idea of belief. Ancient
polytheistic religions typically do not demand that a worshiper recite a creed
or promise to believe any particular thing. It is not that such religions do
not have beliefs, but polytheistic religions are generally not exclusivistic.
In other words, they did not claim to have exclusive hold on truth. The ancient
peoples generally accepted that it was likely that all religious worship had
validity and likely shared truth with the religious worship in which you
already partook. And these religions often shared with one another in their
cultic practices, such that the worship of Isis, for instance, an Egyptian
cult, became very popular in Rome itself. The ancient religion were tolerant, such
that it was even open to questioning its own validity, as can be seen in the
development of philosophy, which should be seen as an expression of ancient
religion, despite the opinions of some scholars.

Areas of Controversy between the
ancient religion and Christians

When Christianity entered into this
wide-open and tolerant religious world, it does not take much imagination
to intuit the reaction. This new religion was exclusivistic; this is a scholastic term which identifies religions
which assert that they have exclusive spiritual knowledge and that all other
religions are erroneous. Christianity was the first religion to make such a
claim in the Western world, Islam being the second. This religion claimed
that all of the ancient ancestral Gods were false and that in order to save
oneself (an idea that in itself would be very strange to the ancient peoples),
one had to abandon your previous beliefs and adopt a religion that was
promulgated by a man who was executed like a common criminal, but who the
Christians were claiming was actually the lord of the universe. To the ancient
mind, these ideas were strange and preposterous and attacked long-held and
cherished familiar beliefs and customs. It was outrageous for such an
intolerant view to be expressed in the ancient world, a world which was
accustomed to friendliness from other religious traditions. Exclusivism would have been viewed as ývris (hubris; Gr.
ὕβρις), excessive pride and insolence.

Another factor which fueled fear of
Christians was the widely held belief that giving worship to the Gods was
beneficial for the common welfare, but now a strange religion was entering the
empire that not only refused to worship the ancestral Gods but openly
desecrated them. Rumors spread that the Christians worshiped in secret (those
who were not baptized were excluded) and that they partook in rituals
which involved incest (from the Christian habit of calling each other brother
and sister, kissing each other in greeting, and being baptized in the nude) and
the eating of children (derived from the Eucharist ritual of eating
the bread and wine representing the body and blood of the Son of
God).

Persecution of Christians

In our time, here in 2010 CE, we
live in a world which is largely Christian; this is still true, at least in the
western hemisphere. The predominance of polytheism has all but disappeared in this part of the world. What
accounts for this passing? Did the Christians convince the ancient people that
their religion was false, or did the old religions slowly fade away?

There are many controversies
involved with this subject, but here we will primarily investigate one major
topic which is involved in the ascendancy of Christianity in the ancient world:
persecution. Who was being persecuted? Christians. And who persecuted them? Did
the followers of the ancient religions actually persecute Christians and, if
so, why? Is persecution of Christians in antiquity one of the factors that
caused the demise of the ancient cultus?

Throughout their history, Christians
have made the case that the ancient religions were hostile to Christianity from
the start. So the issue is the accusation that in antiquity the
practitioners of the ancient religions persecuted Christians. There is copious
historical evidence which supports this indictment, so we shall endeavor to
explore the issues and try to get a grasp on why one particular religion would
be persecuted in an era known for unsurpassed religious tolerance.

As Christianity gained converts in
the non-Jewish communities beyond Israel, there was a slowly growing animosity
towards the new religion, both in Jewish communities and polytheistic communities. When
Christianity first appeared, it entered into civilizations which had ancestral
polytheistic religions in place; this included all countries with the exception
of the birthplace of Christianity, Israel. Being that the Christians were
evangelical, exclusivistic, and hostile to the worship of other Gods, they quickly infuriated
the local populace wherever they preached their gospel, and there was a
reaction. At first, attacks on Christians were not organized in any way but
were a spontaneous response to what were viewed as offensive and impious
condemnation of local religious traditions. In time, the reaction against
Christians became more organized.

The western world during early
Christianity was largely dominated by the Roman state. The Romans did not care
what religion was held by people under its domination, but the Christians with
their secrecy and abstinence from traditional festivals soon aroused
suspicion with local populaces. The first recorded instance of the empire
having any involvement in the persecution of Christians was in the fire of Rome
in 64 CE. It is believed that in order to divert suspicion of arson on himself,
the emperor Nero, who wanted to initiate a building campaign in the areas where
the fire occurred, used the Christians, an easy target, as a
scapegoat, although it has never been proven who actually started this fire.
(Tacitus Annals Book 15.44) This was an independent act by the
emperor himself and was not the result of any law against Christians.

In time, however, Christians were
persecuted by the empire through laws. It became an official act of the Roman
state. The original reasoning used by the Romans appears to be based not
so much on prejudice against the Christian religion, but on fear of
insurrection. The crime that the Christians were accused of was
sedition. The idea of this legislation was to prevent people from secretly
gathering, for the fear was that they would conspire against the
government. Christians were by no means the only groups targeted. Often
the worshipers of Diónysos, even before the Christian era, were targets of the similar
laws because, amongst various complaints, they also had hidden meetings; as but
one example, the Senatus consultum de bacchanalibus was a
Senatorial decree banning the worship of Diónysos in 186 BCE with the
penalty for disobedience being death.

Another serious issue in the
persecution of Christians was religious in nature, but not actually an attack
on the Christian worship of their one God or their theology, but rather on
their exclusivity. In recent years we hear news of Christian evangelical
preachers who claim that certain trends in our contemporary society, things
such as the legalization of abortion and homosexual marriage, will bring down
the wrath of God on our world. There has even been at least one preacher who
claimed that HIV Aids was a punishment of God. Such an idea of the vengeance of
heavenly power is not new. There was widespread belief in ancient times that if
an individual would not honor the many Gods of the various localities, and,
even worse, if this person would disparage these Gods, such behavior could
have ill effects on the community at large, angering the Gods and causing
retribution. The ancient Christians would not sacrifice to the ancestral Gods
of the various countries in which they were living, and they preached that the
ancient Gods were false Gods. The Christians further aroused suspicion because
their meetings were held in secret and rumors spread that they ate human flesh
and blood in their rituals. It did not take long before Christian beliefs
aroused great fear and animosity, being that their ideas were thought of as not
only intolerant but highly impious and dangerous to the welfare of the
state.

A major point of contention were
laws compelling citizens to honor emperors as Gods. Concerning this, there are
several issues that must be kept in mind. In reality, this practice was
not exactly worshiping the emperor as a God. After the death of an emperor, the
Senate would somehow decide that the emperor's genius had
joined the ranks of Gods and that he had become deified, like the Heroes of
antiquity. But the Roman edicts which targeted the Christians required
this sacrifice to the emperor's genius while he was yet alive,
and this was repugnant to Christians and forced them to challenge it, or, they
felt, that they had betrayed their religion. Further, the Romans believed
that giving cultus to the emperor, just as to the pantheon of ancestral
deities, was for the benefit of the state, and, conversely, not giving such
worship was viewed as to the detriment of the state. A typical punishment for
refusing to do the sacrifice was for the Christian to be given to the
entertainments of the arena, where they were publicly fed to wild animals or
left almost defenseless against armed gladiators, and various other cruelties.
Thus the birth of the famous Christian martyrs.

To give the reader a flavor of how
the Roman thought, we have here an excerpt of an actual account of a trial of
Christians executed under the rule of (strangely enough) Marcus Aurelius
in 180 CE in Carthage, North Africa:

WHEN Praesens,
for the second time, and Claudianus were the consuls, on the seventeenth day of
July, at Carthage, there were set in the judgment-hall Speratus, Nartzalus,
Cittinus, Donata, Secunda and Vestia.

Saturninus the
proconsul said: Ye can win the indulgence of our lord the Emperor, if ye return
to a sound mind.

Speratus said:
We have never done ill, we have not lent ourselves to wrong, we have never
spoken ill, but when ill-treated we have given thanks; because we pay heed to
our Emperor.

Saturninus the
proconsul said: We too are religious, and our religion is simple, and we swear
by the genius of our lord the Emperor, and pray for his welfare, as ye also
ought to do.

Saturninus
said: I will not lend mine ears to thee, when thou beginnest to speak evil
things of our sacred rites; but rather swear thou by the genius of our lord the
Emperor.

Speratus said:
The empire of this world I know not; but rather I serve that God, whom no man
hath seen, nor with these eyes can see. I have committed no theft; but if I
have bought anything I pay the tax; because I know my Lord, the King of kings
and Emperor of all nations.

The Christians in this trial (called
the Scillitan Martyrs) would not recant their beliefs and were all put to
death, but not after being given thirty days in order to reconsider their
position. From this account, it is obvious that the officials in charge were
not always enthusiastic in carrying out these edicts.

Persecution of Christians
transformed into a horrific mold with an edict of Trajan Decius (b. 201, d.
251; ruled 249-251 CE) which persisted from 250-251 CE, aimed not only at
Christian clergy but on the Christian laity as well, requiring all people to
sacrifice to the Gods for 'the safety of the Empire.' [1] This
persecution ended when the emperor was killed by the Goths in 251 CE. The
emperor Valerian (b. 193?, d. 260; ruled 253-260 CE) issued another similar
edict which lasted from 258-260, but he was captured in battle by the Sassanid
king of the Persian empire, Shapur I, who used the emperor as a living
footstool to mount his horse, ending the edict. The most notorious was a series
of four edicts which comprised the Great Persecution, primarily
under Diocletian (b. 244, d. 314; ruled 284-305 CE), beginning in
303. This was the first systematic attempt by the empire to eradicate
Christianity and involved the confiscation of church property, the destruction
of the top church officials, burning of Christian scripture, and loss of
political and judicial rights. The fourth edict required the Christians to
sacrifice and those who refused were executed.

The persecutions of Christians were
an abomination, enough cannot be said to condemn them, and they were were
completely contrary by the true spirit of freedom which is the genuine Ællinismόs. Those who hold the genuine Ællinismόs in their heart, now
and through all history, fight all such injustice and cruelty. Period. Let
these historical events stand as a powerful admonition to all people, that
those who condone injustice or stand by while injustice is being done and do
nothing, will reap retribution by mere association alone and must bear some
blame.

Constantine and the end of an era

At the beginning of the 4th century
CE, the aggression against the Christians persisted, but the
persecutions ended for good in 313 CE with the Edict of Milan,
signed by the convert-emperor Constantine I (b.272, d. 337; ruled 306-337)
and his co-emperor Licinius I (b. 263, d. 325; ruled 308-324), protecting
the right to practice religion for both Christians and pagans. At this
time, the empire faced enormous difficulties. There were powerful non-Roman
peoples who were threatening the borders and there were uprisings within the
vast territories. Many scholars believe that Constantine devised to use
Christianity as a means of unifying the empire under one religion and one God
under the leadership of a glorious Christian ruler (Constantine ruled alone
after Licinius I died in 325). This allegation calls into question the
sincerity of Constantine's conversion, but whether or not it is true, it can be
argued that the Christianization of the empire had this effect, at least to
some degree.

It is significant to note that
Christian numbers until the conversion of Constantine are believed to have been
quite small, approximately 5% of the entire population of the empire. It took a
Constantine, actually many emperors, and all the power and money of imperial
patronage to convert the people. And money and power flowed into the
church in abundance, for the idea of separation of religion and state was
unknown in the ancient world. The imperial government and aristocracy
supported the temples before ascension of Christianity. Now it was evident that
to please the emperor, one must be Christian, and therefore within time the
aristocracy fell into place. By the end of the century, the numbers of
Christians had increased to perhaps 50% of the peoples of the empire; one
cannot help but wonder at the sincerity of these conversions.

The conversion of Constantine was an
event of immense significance with ramifications that continue to affect our
world to this very day. Without his conversion, the history of the western
world would have been immensely different.

Julian the Philosopher-Emperor

There was one final attempt by a
Roman emperor to champion the ancient religion. Julian II (born 331? CE) became
emperor in 361 CE. He was born into a Christian family and was the son of a
half-brother of Constantine. Julian converted to the ancient religion, was
highly inspired by the Neoplatonist philosophers, and was initiated into
the Ælefsínia Mystíria (Eleusinian Mysteries; Gr. Ἐλευσίνια
Μυστήρια). Upon gaining the throne, he attempted to restore ancestral
worship and philosophy and to rule as a philosopher-king. His administration removed
imperial patronage of the churches and bishops, but he was tolerant and did not
persecute the Christians. Julian was the last emperor to rule Rome (perhaps
with the exception of Anthemius [b. 420, d. 472; ruled 467-472]) who
followed the ancient religion. With his premature death from a battle wound in
364 CE, the government immediately fell back to the hands of Christian emperors
and the cause of the ancient religion as a viable public presence was doomed.

Persecution of the ancient religion
by Christians

Once the emperors were now Christian
and the new faith was the official religion of the empire, it was through Roman
laws that now practitioners of the ancient religion, rather than Christians,
were persecuted. Although Ællinismόs itself cannot be blamed for the
persecution of Christians, the extent of suffering and injustice imposed upon
Christians left a kind of communal guilt hanging on the ancient elite and
populace, regardless of whether the actual responsibility was the Roman
imperial government or the practitioners of the old religion. And since the
Christian cult was persecuted for over two centuries, it can hardly be
surprising that when the Christians gained political power, they exacted
retribution, and arguably more pernicious punishment on their religious
predecessors by the edicts against of the ancient cults under Theodosius I (b.
347, d. 395; ruled 379-395 CE) enacted from 389-392:

"(Cod.
Theod. xvi. ro . 4, 6), forbidding all sacrifices
on pain of death, and still more by the statutes
of Theodosius (Cod . Theod. xvi . 10 . 12) enacted in 392, in
which sacrifice and divination were declared treasonable
and punish-able with death; the use of lights, incense, garlands and
libations was to involve the forfeiture of house and land where
they were used; and all who entered heathen temples were to be
fined." [2]

Even
if an individual was willing to become a martyr for Ællinismόs, one's
heirs would be ruined because your property and wealth was confiscated, forcing
the ancient religion underground or to be abandoned altogether.

In
392 CE the great sanctuary of Ælefsís (Eleusis;
Gr. Ἐλευσίς) was closed, its demise being a powerful symbol of the
state-run Christian era that had begun, and this commenced a new era of
persecutions, now against the pagans.

One
significant way in which these persecutions differed from their predecessors is
that the Christian Church itself was heavily involved, a fact which can be
firmly substantiated. The Church encouraged the Empire to persecute, usually at
the instigation of the local bishop. It is as though a pent up fury of
vengeance was now exacted upon the ancient establishments and populace. In
addition to legislation, these powerful bishops would at times act independent
of the state and order local monastics to destroy and sack the ancestral
temples. The sacred artwork was laid to waste, disfigured, and desecrated.
Typically, a group of monks and Christian ascetics would enter a temple and
publicly ask the Gods to prove themselves. Many of the ascetics were notorious
for their fearsome appearance, some with beards straggling down to their legs,
who lived in total poverty, and, having absolutely nothing to lose, would
arrive like a torrent in the temples, wild and glaring, so the accounts
say.

One
description is given by the rhetorician Livánios (Libanius;
Gr. Λιβάνιος. 314-392 CE) of Antiókheia (Antioch;
Gr. Ἀντιόχεια) in a plea to the emperor Theodosius I:

"(ed.
the monks)...hasten to attack the temples with sticks and stones and bars of
iron, and in some cases, disdaining these, with hands and feet. Then utter
desolation follows, with the stripping of roofs, demolition of walls, the
tearing down of statues and the overthrow of altars, demolishing one, they
scurry to another, and to a third, and trophy is piled on trophy...and they are
in disgrace unless they have committed the foulest outrage. So they sweep
across the countryside like rivers in spate, and by ravaging the temples, they
ravage the estates, for wherever they tear out a temple from an estate, that
estate is blinded and lies murdered. Temples, Sire, are the soul of the
countryside: they mark the beginning of its settlement , and have been passed down
through many generations to the men of today. In them the farming communities
rest their hopes for husbands, wives, children, for their oxen and the soil
they sow and plant. An estate that has suffered so has lost the inspiration of
the peasantry together with their hopes, for they believe that their labour
will be in vain once they are robbed of the Gods who direct their labours to
their due end." [3]

The
monks would proceed to pull down the cult statues, desecrate them, and hurl the
priests into a mighty fire. Once this had been accomplished, they would declare
to the stupefied populace, to great effect, that their Gods must be
false since they were unable to defend their own statues or exact revenge on
those who laid to waste their sanctuaries. Let this be a powerful warning to
those in our contemporary communities who embrace superstition, who ignore the
logic of the philosophers, and who accept the superficial interpretation of
myth, that such beliefs rest on a worthless foundation that can be easily
overturned by a skillful individual who sees the flaw in such thinking and
takes advantage of it. Superstition has no place in the
genuine Ællinismόs and superstition places our communities at great
risk, as history has proven definitively.

A
century later, the situation for the public practice of Ællinismόs had
become largely demoralized:

"Already
the mysteries of philosophy were turned into objects of mirth and great
laughter by some of those people whose ears are shattered and perception
destroyed, says Damascius about the fact that some people divulged (ed. under
coercion) the mysteries of philosophy." [4]

When Christians acquired political
power, they created a world of intolerance consistent with initial impressions
of the religion since its emergence in antique times. At the beginning of this
discourse, we stated that Christianity was something new in the ancient world,
a religion that claimed absolute and sole legitimacy. Now that it possessed
political power, the Christian church very quickly acted on their convictions
with complete impunity, tolerating no other religions. Within a very short time
they persecuted even Judaism, a religion with which they had roots, and within
the Christian churches themselves, forbidding deviations of doctrine, which they
declared to be heresies. The justification for persecution was given by
Augustine, bishop of Hippo, a response to his observation that when the
heretical Donatists were punished, most of them aligned with the church and
abandoned the beliefs which the church found objectionable. Since Augustine was
highly influential in the early church, his arguments condoning compulsion were
expanded. These early actions of the church created a pattern which continued
for a millennium and beyond until the church lost the power to
enforce its will.

We can see how this works in a small
and bizarre example; in 662 CE, Maximus the Confessor (Gr. Μάξιμος ὁ
Ὁμολογητής), a highly learned monk, was tried, imprisoned, and tortured for his
acceptance of the dyophysite theological position, the doctrine that Jesus had
two natures, divine and human, and both a human and divine will. This was
thought to be a heresy. He would not recant his beliefs, so his tongue was cut
out and his writing-hand chopped off, to prevent him from spreading his ideas,
and he died shortly thereafter. After his death, the dyophysite position became
the accepted doctrine, and he was declared a saint due to his having died and
suffered for the church, but they could not call him a martyr, for the Christians
themselves had done this to him. One has to wonder if they then went on a
witch-hunt and cut out the tongues of those who held the previously accepted
position. And this is just one of so many examples which could be offered of
Christian intolerance within the church itself.

In
the end, there was one religion and only one way to understand this religion,
as all those who disagreed were treated severely or fled to safer areas outside
the reach of the church. And thus we have here the prototype exclusivistic
religion in its most pristine form and a long historical record to demonstrate
the results of such exclusivism.

It
must be clearly understood that the old religion...our religion...did
not slowly "fade away" as has been stated in so many books; our ancestors
were forced to abandon their religion. Our religion did not fade away, it was
systematically destroyed. Of course this is not actually true because there
were some who hid the religion and kept it. And our religion ultimately cannot
be destroyed in any case, because it reflects the truth, and in the end we will
prevail because we possess a true religion which is an expression of the
phenomenal world. How do tolerant people in a civilized society deal with a
world-view which is inherently intolerant? This problem has yet to be resolved
but perhaps we are participating in the process of working out its solution, a
process which may require several painful millenia.

The
Dark Age

The term Dark Age,
coined by the Italian scholar Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch, 1304-1374 CE),
refers to the period commencing with the "fall of
Rome" [5] and ending with the dawn of the Renaissance. There are
contemporary scholars who take the position that the idea of a dark age during
this time period is a fantasy. We will generalize the position thus: being that
a more-or-less civilized world continued through to the Renaissance,
accompanied by some intellectual growth, one cannot point to this period and
call it a period of 'darkness' and collapse. This website maintains a different
and older position. We will generalize also: the Dark Age began in 381 CE with
the edicts of Theodosius I. These decrees prohibited the practice of the
ancient Ællinismόs and gave Nicean Christianity the backing of imperial law,
followed by the rule of various Christian kingdoms. Why does this deserve the
title of a 'dark age?' Not because it forced the old religion into obscurity,
but because these edicts made freedom-of-thought a crime, which had the same
effect. From this point forward, all scientific, religious, and philosophical
thought was required to filter through the eyes and growing power of
Christianity, a religion which, working closely together with government, began
a policy of intellectual censorship.

Entering
the Modern Era

The
Christian Church underwent three historical events which had far-reaching
effects over time:

1.
The split between the Eastern (Orthodox) and Western (Roman Catholic) churches
in 1054 CE.

2.
The humiliation of Pope Boniface VIII under Philip the Fourth of France in 1303
at Anagni, which marked the beginning of the independence of political
institutions from the church.

3.
The Protestant Reformation begun in 1517.

These
three were signposts of a new era very slowly emerging, due to the fact that
Christianity lost control of consistency of doctrine. In particular, following
the Reformation, numerous forms of Christianity began to emerge, some of which
would have been previously condemned and extinguished as heretical. These three events also led
to a great loss of the political power held by the Roman Catholic church. The fall of Constantinople in May 1453 by the Ottoman Turks, for all practical purposes, completely subordinated the eastern Christians to Islam and the Western Roman Empire was no more.

The
Renaissance humanism, from the 14th through the 17th centuries, marked a great rebirth
of interest in the classical world and an effort to re-claim the achievements
of antiquity. This paved the way for enormous gains in the field of science which
blossomed with the Enlightenment, commencing in the late 17th century. All of this gave birth to open skepticism of Christian beliefs. The eventual acceptance that the earth revolved around the sun, that our planet was not flat but, rather, a type of globe, and other scientific discoveries shook the foundation of the understanding of reality.

Thus,
as the centuries progressed, the situation of tolerance began to very gradually
improve, a major force being the power of the writings of Voltaire, Victor
Hugo, and many others. With the appearance of Deism in the 17th and 18th
centuries, we have the first non-Christian religion that was being practiced
openly in Europe and America.

It
is only in the 20th century, however, that significant tolerance of
non-Christian religions and philosophies began to appear in the West. Although
persecution of Ællinismόs and other non-Christian religions
continues, freedom of religion has blossomed throughout the world, a major
force being the United Nations; to be a charter member of the United Nations, a
country must enact legislation that guarantees freedom of religion, whether or
not such legislation is entirely effective.

Without
legal coercion on behalf of religious liberty, the threat of persecution
against minority religions and beliefs remains a reality, and even in modern
Greece itself, those who follow the old religion still largely practice in
considerable secrecy. [6] Christian leaders throughout the world continue
to act with impunity, preaching against non-Christian belief-systems and,
particularly in the United States, they have, in recent decades, gained
political power, inroads which are worrisome to those who are not Christian,
regardless of one's religious tradition. During the administration of George W.
Bush, it became very difficult for non-Christian politicians
to exercise any power, even if they were of Mr. Bush's Republican
party; there existed the so-called "litmus test" which was
uncovered during his presidency, although denied by the administration.

There
has never been a public admission by Christian churches that a great wrong had
been done to Ællinismόs; quite the contrary, many Christian preachers
continue to condemn our beliefs and call our Gods false, or instruments of
evil, and they continue to try to force their convictions on others through law
(such as the effort to bring prayer into political meetings or in public
schools). It must, however, be stated and applauded that Pope John-Paul II made
a public admonition of the guilt of the church for the persecution of Jews and
the church's silence during the Holocaust of WWII, and there were other
admissions and apologies by this Pope for various similar sins of the church.
It would be a great thing if Ællinismόs would receive such an apology,
as our religious ancestors have the dubious distinction of being the very first
recipients of the church's intolerance.

In
conclusion, although this article is vastly too brief and hardly does justice
to the complexity of these issues, the author hopes that at least some of the
major points have been presented in a manner that would inspire the reader to
further study.

.

Recommended
Reading:

A
Chronicle of the Last Pagans by
Pierre Chuvin

NOTES:

[1]
The reader may assume that Jews were also the victims of these laws but, in
fact, they were exempted. Although this may seem strange to us today, because
the Jews were a very ancient people with a religion of great antiquity, the
Romans held them in some esteem. Great age was highly venerated in the ancient
world and for this reason the Jews were not required to sacrifice to the
emperor but were allowed a different means of sacrificing for the benefit of
the state. The Christians, on the other hand, were viewed as a new sect and new
things were seen with great suspicion in ancient times. Of course the Jews did
have enormous problems with the empire, eventually resulting in the sacking of
Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple in 70 CE, but the Romans did not
exact this devastation because of the religion of the Jews, but rather on
account of insurrection.

[5]
The "fall of Rome," traditionally given the date 476 CE, is in
parenthesis because the Roman empire continued in the east with the Byzantine
emperors ruling from Constantinople until its fall to the Ottoman Turks in
1453.

[6]
In Greece during the Lenten season there is the yearly reading of Synodikón (Synodicon;
Gr. Συνοδικόν) of Orthodoxy which includes a condemnation
of ancient Greek philosophy and beliefs (largely in response to the teachings
of Ioánnis Italós (Johannes Italus; Gr. ἸωάννηςὁἸταλός) in
the eleventh century CE) which declares the
following anáthima (Gr. ἀνάθημα): those who introduce ancient
Greek doctrines of the soul, heaven, and earth into the Church, Palingænæsía (Palingenesia
or Reincarnation;Gr. Παλιγγενεσία) and those who believe
in the preexistence of souls, that the forms and matter are eternal as is
God (Mystic
Materialism), those who believe and teach
ancient Greek philosophy, including the ideas of Plátohn (Plato;
Gr. Ρλάτων).

The logo to the left is the principal symbol of this website. It is called the CESS logo, i.e. the Children of the Earth and the Starry Sky. The Pætilía (Petelia, Πετηλία) and other golden tablets having this phrase (Γῆς παῖς εἰμί καὶ Οὐρανοῦ ἀστερόεντος) are the inspiration for the symbol. The image represents this idea: Earth (divisible substance) and the Sky (continuous substance) are the two kozmogonic substances. The twelve stars represent the Natural Laws, the dominions of the Olympian Gods. In front of these symbols is the seven-stringed kithára (cithara, κιθάρα), the lyre of Apóllohn (Apollo, Ἀπόλλων). It (here) represents the bond between Gods and mortals and is representative that we are the children of Orphéfs (Orpheus, Ὀρφεύς).

PLEASE NOTE:

Throughout the pages of this website, you will find fascinating stories about our Gods. These narratives are known as mythology, the traditional stories of the Gods and Heroes. While these tales are great mystical vehicles containing transcendent truth, they are symbolic and should not be taken literally. A literal reading will frequently yield an erroneous result. The meaning of the myths is concealed in code. To understand them requires a key. For instance, when a God kills someone, this usually means a transformation of the soul to a higher level. Similarly, sexual union with a God is a transformation.

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